


Stella Maris

by quiltedspacemittens



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens All Media Works
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Catholicism, Depictions of anxiety, Emotionally significant weather conditions, I wrote this for me but you can read it too, Mariology, Other, Pining, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sacrilege, Seaside Rendezvous, only donna tartt can judge me, pwp pining without plot, you know the drill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:47:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26653903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiltedspacemittens/pseuds/quiltedspacemittens
Summary: Maine, 1892. Crowley watches for Aziraphale from a widow's walk. Takes to praying.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 19





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by a throwaway line from _The Goldfinch _. I don't know anything about the ocean and I'm sorry.__

It’s an ancient promise, folklore now. An old wives’ tale, repeated by the women whose shadows haunt these old cupolas, staring endlessly out to sea. If you pray the rosary, you will not die by drowning. _Ave marias_ in salt-dried throats, packed in ice, preserved for winter. Twine knots in callused fingers. Counting up to fifty, thumb and forefinger ticking like a minute hand.

It feels primordial to Crowley, this slipknot rosary hanging slack, fluttering in the wind. He stands motionless on the widow’s walk, watching the waves roll in. One after the other, steady and sure, abraded by the wind. The waves and the winds and the abyss, there in the beginning, this water kicked against the rocks, sputtering into foam. No beginning, no end.

The beads are damp in his stiff, frozen fingers. He has gloves, proper and unyielding, folded in a drawer down below. It’s too difficult to feel the beads through the leather. It matters that he doesn’t miss a single one. He doesn’t care about promises, there are no promises that can be made to him, so he offers them instead for Aziraphale, lurching precariously on those waves somewhere. _Hail, full of grace._

The house is tall, once white, now faded, fog-stained. It stands hunched, shoulders pulled up to its ears. The walk on the third floor is open to the air, wrapped around the indoor landing, perched above the steep eaves and seal-grey shingles. White paint peeling from gaunt rails. Narrow planks dark and soft with rain. The door into the small bedroom, tucked under a flattened-looking dome topped with a weathervane, is often left open. Opaque glass windows on all sides, fifteen panes, cheerful blue and white striped curtains. The bed with its patchwork quilt, the line of shells on the pinewood dresser, speckled with knots from the lumber. Growth-ringed, once. Tree flesh spiraling out from a meager core, stronger and taller by the year, straining upwards, over the tops of the canopy, on the hills overlooking the sea. Tarnished brass handles. A small bedside table, with a lantern, the candle inside unlit. There is room for a desk against the other wall, but Crowley has banished it, preferring the starkness, the empty, purposeless austerity.

The fog is thick-knit and expansive. It bears down on the house during the day, stifling, a ruthlessly imposed myopia. Crowley watches the thin, fine line where the grey sky meets the grey sea. It ripples with the waves and the wind and the bobbing schooners in the harbor. Parchment paper sails snapping, double-stranded ropes swinging like pendulums. Timepieces and anemometers. Need winding every twenty-four hours, a skeleton key twisted tight. Crowley makes a vigil of it, up with the weak light streaming into this clocktower house from the east, asserting itself through the fifteen squat windowpanes.

The beads dangle from his waist, a cloistered nun awake for lauds, rising relentless into the cold-shouldered early morning. It’s made from fishermen’s twine, unblessed, sackcloth scratchy under his fingertips. He loops it over his fingers, against his palm and his ice-rigid knuckles. He doesn’t touch the beads, but clings instead to the space between them, prises a fingernail into the double-stranded twine.

Aziraphale is out there. Observing the same watches as he is, the same times and seasons. Matins and Vespers and Compline. The same long-fingered daybreak. Throttled by the same sunlight. Crowley wonders if Aziraphale is seasick, if he has scurvy. If he has ropeburn on his soft palms, if he fumbles with the sails. If the ship is still afloat at all, hasn’t been dismembered by the sea, each plank drifting outward in a slowly widening spiral. Blue shifting, forever running from the scene of the disaster. Crowley finds himself an ocean away from Aziraphale, endlessly scouring the shoreline for broken boards.

Sometimes it wakes him in the middle of the night, choked and gasping. Mouth moving uselessly. The deep, black sea squeezing him from all sides. Aziraphale far from him, far from the shore, rounding the edge of the world somewhere. He rises from bed, spectral in the dark, meanders around the walk, again and again. Makes sure the lighthouses are still blinking their vague phantom illumination into the fog, each time he rounds the corner. His own breath ragged in his ears, loud as a foghorn. Teeth chattering over the ceaseless thundering of the waves. Crowley cannot see it, a void roaring in front of him, stopping six inches from his face. Tumbling, crashing into the rocky shoreline, smashing again and again, repetitive, violent, invisible. He can’t reach for it, it moves with his line of vision, stuck and floating too far away.

Fishbone in his throat. Candles like fingers, a pair bound together, crossed with red ribbons, the feast day of Saint Blaise. The day after Candlemas, the Gothic, ill-lit, thick-stoned gloom still brightened by joyful, dancing candlelight, beeswax dripping on the floor. You stick your neck out, let your Adam’s apple be blessed. The seeds of your own destruction, stuck there, indigestible. _May God deliver you from every illness._ The stained glass Annunciation in the church window, visible in the late afternoon even from outside, the scroll unraveling from Gabriel’s lips. _Ave, Maria_. Weaseling his way into the spotlight. What a twat.

 _Ave_ , the reverse of Eva. The New Eve. Crowley looks at the statues on the facades. The narrow drape of the clothes, horizontal folds, always oversized. Dainty hands, extended artfully like posed dolls. Expressionless faces. Unperturbable. It distresses Crowley, his head howling with power, his fingers tingling with the urge to rip the stone limb from rough-hewn limb. How could you maintain serenity, how could you not resist the burden shunted onto you, heavy and forceful and unannounced. Eve had stood her ground, had let the pain rend her. Rebuilt herself, scaffolded rib by rib, on the far side of the Tigris. He doesn’t want her to be replaced. The venerated repression, admirable, desirable. _A sword will pierce your heart,_ a crown of thorns born with such resolution, such quiet suffering. Crowley hates it. He can’t emulate it, he refuses to. He wants to reel it closer and closer til it washes over him and won’t stop, pull the bucket down on his head and let it flood him. It won’t, keeping itself at bay, just out of reach. He can still see his ghostpale fingers in front of his face. It is cold, at night.

The ocean looms, a temptation. Another promise. Deliverance from temptation. _Now and at the hour of our death._ It’s stupid. He crushes the rosary in his hand. Neither he nor Aziraphale can die. The _memento mori_ of it all is too somber and dreary, too reminiscent of the straight-laced people in the fish shop and on the shore. Forever waiting for the miracle on the water, to put the net in on the other side, find it full to bursting. Forever waiting for the storm to calm. Impractical faith, unproven superstition, too hard to let go of, to entrust yourself completely to chaos. So Crowley runs the beads through his fingers, again and again. The whole prayer, rolling off his lips mindlessly. He rocks with it, with the waves, the bentwood chair runners, the lilting cadence of the words. It feels significant. At least he’s doing something.

A shrine set into the rocks beneath the lighthouse. A beneficent statue, dressed all in blue. Madonna and child, saviors of seamen, guiding them home. Fishermen leave things there, fishhooks and wild aster, mother of pearl. _Stella Maris._ Star of the sea. A mythologized translation error. Wouldn’t be the first time. Crowley should like it, flouting the spiritual work of mercy. Instruct the ignorant. Devotion proliferating, little statues in lighthouse rooms, prayers on the back of thin paper cards. Cheap, runny inks, styled after Gutenberg’s Bible. Forty-two lines a page, two columns. _One on your left and one on your right._ Goats and sheep. Chaff and wheat. Bread and wine. Is he anything but a thief, remember-me-this-day-in-paradise?

On the rare cloudless nights, Crowley finds the stars he made. He lies on his back on the wooden deck, skirts splayed around him, legs twisted to keep the heat in. Glasses off, inside, propped against the lantern on his nightstand, arms folded, left over right. He picks his stars out of the lineup, can always recognize them, even as the universe is transfigured around him, as the reliable pole star is dislodged. Painted in primary colors and set aflame, blue and red and yellow. Scolds them in his head like he does his plants. _Shine better._ Lighthouses of his own creation, out desolate in the universe, stuck on the rocks with no one to replenish their oil. They burn themselves out, eventually. A supernova overhanging a stable. Empty upper rooms, gone out to preach the gospel, to speak in every tongue. A spring bubbling up in Lourdes. _Dirt shall you eat._ Miraculous cures, the huddled masses in the grotto. Replicas everywhere, manmade rock walls, carefully caulked to look provincial. Discreetly placed donation boxes. Coins clattering through the rusty metal slit. A penny for a votive, a quarter for a pillar, near the front. Light one, spark the rosary-twine wick. The long, slender skewers, plunged into ash. _Shine better._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Fun fact: today (September 25) is the feast day of Stella Maris. Second chapter will hopefully come on a similarly significant date. Find me on [tumblr.](https://theseedsofdoom.tumblr.com)


	2. Chapter 2

Crowley finds the end of the beads, feels the intersection of the strands, the hard point where the string was burnt to prevent it fraying. Pinched between thumb and forefinger, inserted cautiously into the seablue heart of the flame. All the threads held together by that singed nub, glued in place. Protected from falling apart. He squeezes the large knot, one string diverging in three strands. _Mater misericordiae._ The wind picks up as night falls. There is no sunset, just a steady darkening of the fog, a blotting out of the light. Crowley hunches in on himself, shoulders slumped forward, chest caved in, trying to spare his shrine-heart a battering.

Aziraphale appears to him then, ghostpale, crowned with white, bouncing curls. The widow’s walk is greying further. Marsh-roses, hardly pink, fill his apron, held out in front of him. An offering, an olive branch, two turtle doves in the temple. Dressed in all white, one sleeve rucked up, one alabaster shoulder visible, porcelain-veined in the low light.

“There you are!” Aziraphale says mildly. “I looked all over for you.”

Crowley reels, thinking wildly of hallucinations, fog coalescing, gravity tumbling into the shape of Aziraphale, rounded and full and drifting. The tide is coming in, and Aziraphale is smiling at him patiently.

“A-Aziraphale.” Crowley’s eyes adjust, discern the subtle warm light behind Aziraphale, rising golden through the trap door. It frames him like a portrait, blank-backgrounded, vague, unencroachable, the darkness dwindling to nothing in the light of his person.

“Come down.” Aziraphale gestures with his elbow, hands full. “I brought you flowers.”

The second floor is wood-paneled and dark. Furniture ghostly, covered in sheets. Shelves set into the walls on either side of the fireplace. They’re sparse but for a few knickknacks, guides to fish and wildlife and flora, tattered signal flags, ships in bottles. Conch shells serving as bookends. A disused dining table, fawnlike and wobbling, a table runner lined with candles that Aziraphale has lit. A sideboard against one wall, unfurled in preparation for a feast that will never come. The last supper already served from it. There is no freshwater in the house. Crowley’s hands twitch, empty. He has nothing to offer Aziraphale.

Aziraphale miracles a water-filled vase, cut like a lighthouse lens, dicing the candlelight and scattering it against the walls. In spite of the candles, Aziraphale is radiant, stooped over the dining table as he lowers the roses into the vase. As if he is his own light source. Crowley gravitates to him, unable to stop himself, unable to prevent the tide coming in. The table is black spruce, dark-wooded, thick with resin. Crowley scrapes at it with one pointer finger, avoiding Aziraphale’s eyes.

“Did you not know I would be here?” Crowley has not allowed himself to think to this place, to think past shipwrecks, lightning striking the mast, absent lighthouse keepers, splintered hulls taking on water, prows dashed on the rocks. He hasn’t thought once of safe harbor, of calm seas, of watching the ship come into port from the dock, bright in the winter sun. He hasn’t thought once of homecomings.

Aziraphale stops arranging the flowers. “You’re good at hiding, Crowley.” His gaze is on Crowley’s glasses, the lens bending around the side, a wrap-around porch, a battalion of fenceposts, one extra defense. His hands shift, cup gently around the fragile buds. His nails match them, pink and white. Spring-pale. He’s probably cold, Crowley realizes, in this funereal, perpetually dark mausoleum of a house.

The silence lingers, sweeping in from upstairs. Crowley snaps, anxious and languid at once, a fire blooming in the grate. Tosses his glasses on the dining table. “Angel,” he begins uncertainly, then stops. He can see out the window, between the loose drapery of the heavy curtains. The night is clear, blacker than usual without the cloud cover. He can see the nearest lighthouse, shining stark and bright with no obstructing fog.

Aziraphale pauses, turning away from the flowers, one hand disappearing into the folds of his dress, the lace brushing against the bend of his wrist. “I have something for you, my dear.”

“No, no,” Crowley protests. “Don’t have anything to give you.” It is not the right season for roses. The flowers have thorns. Before, in the garden, they did not need such a defense. Now their beauty must be protected by sharpness. Aziraphale’s care can only be out of self-preservation, a desire not to prick his finger.

Aziraphale extracts his fist from his pocket. “I’m not asking anything of you, Crowley.” He reaches for Crowley’s hand, supports it on his own. “Here.” Aziraphale lets his fingers unspool, revealing a smooth, white stone. “A sea stone.” His voice drops, hushed nearly to a whisper. “Washed round and round until it is perfect.”

Crowley closes his hand around the stone, the heat of it boring into his palm. His fingers are already working, rubbing the stone in circles, thumb scraping at the miniscule indentation, tugging the edge of it like rosary beads. Plucked from the shoreline, dulled and tamed and smoothed. No longer toothed and jagged, no longer able to support lighthouses, cleave through hulls. Crowley recognizes it instantly, knows Aziraphale bought it at the general store in town. He has peered in the window of the store, has seen Aziraphale reflected in the glass, in the royal blue awnings. Has seen him in every display case, in every full-to-bursting catch of lobster. Thought of oysters and pearls and sand dollars. He looks up with unshielded eyes, the color of goldenrod, timid flowers growing on the side of the house, spindly roots clutching desperately at the poor soil.

He reaches out for Aziraphale. “Come upstairs with me.”

Aziraphale rises obediently, takes Crowley’s outstretched hand. Crowley leads the way, arm twisted behind his back so he does not have to let go of Aziraphale.

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, stepping into the little room, as if really seeing it for the first time. His gaze roams over everything, the quilted comforter and the pinewood headboard and the flimsy iron lantern. “Shall we light this?”

The candle in the lantern, stuffed into the metal holder, has never been lit before. Off-white tallow, hand-dipped, a few wax drips slid down the side like tears. Aziraphale goes to it, pries open the thin clasp, rattling the opaque glass panes.

Crowley doesn’t move as Aziraphale ignites the candle with a pass of his hand, the rosary-twine wick sparking and smoking. “There,” he says, turning to Crowley with a smile, as shadows flash dark over the walls. “Isn’t this better than all that gloom?”

The flickering light reminds him of Candlemas in the church, the nave lit with all the illumination that could be mustered in the depths of winter. Dimmed by the fog but never extinguished. Crowley looks at the line of shells reflected in larger, vaguer shadows on the wall. He shows Aziraphale all of them, pointing with one taper finger as Aziraphale turns the shells in his palm, rubs the ridges with his thumb. Cowry and moon snail and clam. Smallest to largest, left to right. Aziraphale touches all of them without hesitation, is awed by all of them, even the dirty ones, the murky ones, the chipped and fragmented ones. The two halves of the bivalves, bound together with string, mouthing open and closed under his fingertips.

“They’re beautiful, Crowley.” Aziraphale looks up at him, meets his gaze, eyes metamorphosing in the candlelight. The colors of the sea, blue and gray and green. Sparkling like the sun off the water. Ringed round with foam.

Crowley is choking on it, the reality of it, the visceral sight of those ocean-painted eyes right in front of him, close enough that he can see each of the waves rolling in. Aziraphale is here. Lighthouse-solid, unmoved by the trembling candlelight. Unharmed by the rocky shoreline, the fierce squalls, the cries of the terns. Not run aground. Safe and whole and _here_. Crowley turns away, shoving his forefinger against his nose before he remembers he left his glasses downstairs. It’s stifling in here. Too bright, too warm, too mobile with the shadows cast all over. He throws open the door, launches himself out, collapses against the railing, the cold air shocking the breath from him.

Aziraphale follows. Of course he does, one hand feathering over Crowley’s back, the other weightless in the crook of his elbow. Crowley can’t get away from the light, can’t avoid the beams of the lighthouse down the shoreline, can’t remove himself from Aziraphale’s sight. It’s too much, for a creature accustomed to darkness, to wide-blown pupils, empty and black, squinting, seeing based on scraps.

“Oh!” Aziraphale says distantly. “I wasn’t expecting to see the stars.”

Crowley wrenches his eyes open, saltwater streaming from them. He throws his head back to look at the sky. Aziraphale is right, it’s dark and moonless, the dots of light he created shining in all their splendor.

Aziraphale slips his arm through Crowley’s. “Would you like to tell me about them? We could take a turn about the walk.”

They circle around the widow’s walk, orbit the sunlit candle glowing, the inner room unshuddered. Crowley grumbles at his stars, coaxing them brighter, more colorful. _Shine better._ They walk until Crowley is dizzy and worried that Aziraphale is straining his neck.

“I usually lay down to watch them,” he says tentatively, stopping on the far side of the walk, drifting to the right of Aziraphale, close to the railing.

Aziraphale brings his head down to look at him, the line of his throat softening. “That sounds lovely.”

Crowley nods, earnest. “Budge up then. Don’t want you so close to the edge.”

Aziraphale laughs, tugs Crowley back to the left of him, against the windows. “No, don’t fret, my dear. I know you won’t let me fall.” Aziraphale takes his hand, their fingers interlacing. “Hold tight.”

Crowley does. He clings to Aziraphale like a goldenrod clings to steep ocean slope soil, stem crawling up the hill in fervent search of the sun, flowering where it can. He clings to the spaces between Aziraphale’s rosary bead fingers and finds comfort there, in these gaps. He doesn’t miss a single bead, a single _Ave._ Announcing himself. Hail, I am here. They lie on their backs, twining their legs together, and later they will lie under the blue patchwork quilt, decorated with simplistic sail boats and fisherman’s knots. Crowley holds tight. They are shoulder to shoulder, ankle to ankle, cincture to cincture. The answer to all his prayers sure and real before him. _My life, my sweetness, and my hope._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If we're gonna be technical, praying the rosary does not explicitly protect from drowning, although drowning is probably subsumed under the promise of protection from death without last rites.  
> I borrowed primarily from the Hail Mary and Hail, Holy Queen prayers, the Presentation and Finding in the Temple, and the apparitions at Lourdes and Guadalupe.  
> I was also inspired by the poem ["Renascence" by Edna St. Vincent Millay](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55993/renascence), the book _Sarah, Plain and Tall_ , and the music of Gregory Alan Isakov, particularly the songs ["Berth,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCamMKkw0Ms&pbjreload=101) ["The Universe,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB4ZTGUsfxY) and ["This Empty Northern Hemisphere."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7SqM9jLTjA) There's a tiny bit of _Little Women_ too.  
> I've also been watching this unbelievably gorgeous [livestream](http://nubblelight.org/webcam1/) from Nubble Lighthouse in York, Maine.  
> And of course, _The Goldfinch_ , which set me off on all this.  
> (Today, September 29th, is Michaelmas Day. St. Michael is the patron saint of the sea in the northern Hebrides of Scotland.)  
> Thanks for reading! Find me on [tumblr](https://theseedsofdoom.tumblr.com) for more calendar facts.


End file.
